‘Altered Carbon’ Episode 1 Recap: Stack To The Future

The beauty of creating a Netflix series is that unless you absolutely fuck up on an almost unimaginably terrible scale, it’s practically guaranteed the audience is going to watch at least two episodes. I watched an entire season of Hemlock Grove, one of the most genuinely incoherent things ever put to screen, because 15 seconds is the perfect amount of time to decide to give something one more try. As such, most Netflix series can get away with a first episode that is almost entirely set-up and exposition. This is the case with Altered Carbon, only multiplied times 250 for every year into the future this series drops us. The opening chapter, titled “Out Of The Past,” is less an hour of TV than it is a adderall-fueled study session the night before finals; words, terms, and definitions whiz by so quickly you wonder if the end credits are going to come with a pop quiz.

To be fair, there is a lot of ground to cover. The series, based on a 2002 cyberpunk science fiction novel by Richard K. Morgan, is heavy on the world-building. In an alternate, dystopia-adjacent future where it is always goddamn raining, mankind has developed the technology to upload consciousness into “stacks” and then downloaded into another body (or “sleeves,” as they’re called here), basically defying death a time or two. Like most things in life, this tech is only available to the very rich or the very willing to break the law. The insanely wealthy and essentially immortal are known as Meths—after Methuselah, the Hebrew Bible’s 969 year old man—who literally live among the clouds, cruelly looking down on those who, like Drake, only live once.

Through flashbacks, we meet Takeshi Kovacs, a former member of an elite squad of body-hopping super-soldiers known as Envoys. Kovacs turned against his own to join an anti-sleeve rebellion led by the immaculately named revolutionary Quellcrist Falconer (Renée Elise Goldsberry). Branded a traitor and terrorist, Kovacs is tracked down and killed, only to be awoken from his freeze-dried sleep 250 years later in a sleeve that looks a hell of a lot like Joel Kinnaman. Early on, Altered Carbon does some terrific work visually to show the absolute mind-bending horror that would be waking up in a body that isn’t yours, especially if that body starred in Suicide Squad.

An enigmatic Meth named Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy, disarmingly British as always) tasks Kovacs with solving the murder of one of his sleeves, so calculatedly carried out that Bancroft can’t remember the culprit. For Kovacs, who fought in a former life to prevent this very future, it’s a job that would come at the price of his dignity.

It’s a simple enough set-up. But the premiere, written by series creator Laeta Kalogridis, keeps the story from its logical endpoint—Kovacs says, “I’ll take the case”—until the last minute. In the meantime, Kovacs wanders the streets of Bay City (formerly San Francisco), mumble-groaning his way between contemplating suicide and tripping absolute balls on futuristic drugs. Visions of Quellcrist haunt him like a ghost. A fiery detective named Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda) shadows him even more closely. The scenery itself rides a fine, razor-thin line between Blade Runner-inspired and copy-paste Blade Runner ripoff.

For the most part, though, Altered Carbon is at least interesting to look at. Occasionally, it’s downright gorgeous in that dirty noir way you can practically smell through the screen. “Out Of The Past” was directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who also serves as executive-producer. Sapochnik is probably best known for helming Game of Thrones‘ “Battle of Bastards,” in which HBO let a couple hundred extras engage in medieval warfare but for real, which remains one of the most technically impressive episodes in TV history. For Altered Carbon, Sapochnik translates the blood-and-guts chaos of “Battle of the Bastards” into a more technological type of frenzy. Bay City is an explosion of neon and sound, the type of world where pop-up advertisements harass you on the street. It’s somehow both a deliriously overwhelming visual and a realistic future-scenario for our current culture, where Amazon two-day shipping is practically a religion.

Sapochnik can also still command one hell of an action sequence. The episode’s highlight takes place in a robo-brothel—run by the scene-stealing Chris Connerin as an AI named Poe, as in comma Edgar Allen—a sequence that sees Kovacs attacked by a crew of thugs looking to end his investigation before it begins.

Performance-wise, Kinnaman isn’t being asked to do much, yet, other than silently seethe and occasionally clench a jaw. Much more magnetic is Arrow‘s Byron Mann, who plays Kovacs during the flashback to the night his last sleeve was killed. The divide between the two performances is an interesting thing; it works narratively because of how much it almost doesn’t work on the surface.

On one hand, it’s impossible not to feel a little ehhhhhhh about a Japanese character, being portrayed by a Chinese-American actor, being killed off so he can be played by the most square-jawed of white men. But on the other, you almost feel like that discomfort—the idea that Kinnaman playing Kovacs feels like a bad mistake, like a person in ill-fitted clothes—is kind of exactly the point.

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.